Senior executives at the BBC will be recalled to Parliament as part of a
“major inquiry” into the future of the Corporation.

MPs on the Commons Culture, Media and Sport select committee will grill BBC bosses following the row over severance payments as well as the fallout of the Jimmy Savile sex abuse scandal.

Earlier this month seven current and former executives appeared in front of the Public Accounts Committee and squabbled in public about who was to blame for paying outgoing executives millions more than they were entitled to.

John Whittingdale, the chair of the culture committee, said that the inquiry will look at the role of the BBC Trust.

Critics have called for the trust to be scrapped in the wake of the pay-offs scandal.

Mr Whittingdale said that recent events over severance payments had given the inquiry “more urgency”.

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“We are going to have a major inquiry in the run-up to charter renewal,” Mr Whittingdale told The Financial Times.

He said the hearings will look at issues including “the structure of governance … the place of the BBC in a difficult environment and how it is funded”.

There have been reports that ministers could axe the BBC Trust and hand over regulation of the Corporation to Ofcom.

Maria Miller, the Culture Secretary, this month said that the future of the BBC Trust is to be reviewed after an “annus horribilis” for the Corporation.

Warning that the Corporation’s handling of executive pay was “just not good enough”, she also said that she will strengthen the powers of the National Audit Office to allow it to demand access to all BBC documents whenever it wanted.

Mrs Miller said that the past 12 months had “undoubtedly been one of the most challenging years in its history. [The latest hearing over payments] was a grim day for its senior management.”

Mrs Miller told an audience at the Royal Television Society in Cambridge that “serious questions were raised about that judgment by the scale of the severance payments made”.